“How can my team continue to do good despite the trying times?”
That’s the question Noel Ng, Regional Sales Manager at Klook, asked himself when the COVID-19 crisis struck Malaysia. At 1 pm, he floated the idea of organizing meal donations for healthcare workers to his team. By 3 pm that day, the Food and Dining team had found restaurants who were willing to participate in the campaign, eventually raising over 1,400 meals for frontline healthcare workers in Malaysia.
Over 1,400 meals were delivered to hospitals in Malaysia
“Cockroach mentality”
When the COVID-19 crisis struck, things were not looking good for Klook’s Food & Dining team. They had spent months partnering up with restaurants and cafes in their markets to provide value-for-money cash vouchers to customers. With lockdowns and social distancing measures suddenly in force, the dine-in business model became unsustainable virtually overnight.
As monumental as the challenge seemed, the Food & Dining team was uniquely prepared for uncertainty and change. Being the newest of six business verticals at Klook, they always considered themselves a startup within a startup.
“We have this cockroach mentality,” jokes Noel. Always looking for new opportunities and staying resilient when things don’t go their way has been an order of business for the F&B team. With the world gripped in the COVID-19 crisis, this kind of tenacity was just what the team needed to keep going.
How can we do good today?
In the midst of the crisis, Noel and his team changed their focus, but they didn’t lose the old hunger to make as much impact as possible. They decided to leverage their existing partnerships with F&B businesses to launch a campaign supporting healthcare workers.
Thumbs up for a successful meal donation delivery
“The team has such positive relationships with the merchants that they could activate them just like that. All these businesses are in a hard situation and yet, we were able to convince them to come onboard and donate one meal for healthcare workers for every meal bought by Klook customers,” says Noel.
Once they found partners who would donate the meals, there was another challenge: getting the food from the restaurant kitchen to the hospitals where it was needed. Klook is not a food delivery app so the team didn’t have any existing infrastructure to fall back on. But... the colleagues at the transfer team made a few quick calls and soon enough Ivy Holidays KL, a logistics provider, agreed to come on board.
“Once we had food and transport sorted, the idea really took off. PR, marketing and legal teams all jumped into action and within two to three days, the ‘Salute Our Healthcare Heroes’ campaign was rolled out.”
This energy to do good resulted in a campaign so successful it ran two phases and raised over 1,400 meals with the help of generous restaurants and customers.
A message from Klookers to frontline healthcare workers
Different markets, same vision
At Klook, every region operates in a slightly different way. All teams share the same vision, but they also know the strengths and limitations of their market and create business opportunities unique to local nuance.
Klook Cares campaign was organized by the Food & Dining team in Singapore
Having strong and positive relationships with business partners on the ground made it possible to run many successful meal donation campaigns across several markets. In Thailand, the team partnered with fifteen Bangkok restaurants to donate meals to the staff at Bang Bua Thong Hospital 2. In Singapore, Klook Cares initiative set out to raise 5,000 meals for Singapore-based migrant workers who were in need of emergency meal support.
To Noel, the key to the success of his campaign was simple. “As long as you are genuine about it, the energy gets picked up by different parties and it’s amazing what you can achieve.”
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Posted by Klook Careers
